From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict

This is no doubt one of the best books on democracy. It is at least as good as Hungtington's Political orders in changing societies, and The third wave. The author sees democracy as "conditionally good", or democracy is good because it is strategically conditional. The book, however, fails to go further to see that democracy is in fact only "culturally conditional". The God of universal democracy was dead, but too many people are unable or unwilling to accept it.

synder's book breaks down the fallacies of imposing democracy as the cure-all to violent ethnic conflict. the book is quite easy to read, even for folks with no political science background. snyder is particularly effective at laying down a systematic framework as to why emerging democratization often leads to violence, and then provides case studies that illustrate his points clearly. snyder isn't anti-democratization, but he is very wary when the process is started without certain institutions and conditions in place. if the bush administration read this book prior to invading iraq, we might have been able to avoid that catastrophe entirely.

What makes this a great political science book is not merely the provocative counterintuitive claim regarding democratization (specifically partial democractization) offered by the author, but the solid, systematic and CLEAR (!) theoretical and empirical cases offer in support. A pleasure to read and a valuable contribution to scholarship and policy-making alike.